On the Supply of Superior Order-1 Building Blocks for a Class of Periodical Fitness Functions

In addition to GA-deception, the lack of fitness differences among low-order schemata can also degrade GA’s search. Therefore, a coding should present adequate superior low-order building blocks at the early stage of search. This paper aims to reveal the inherent periodicity in the search process of a genetic algorithm, and to show how to make use of this periodicity in the design of representation for fitness functions with periods of the reciprocals of positive integers so as to ensure the effective supply of superior order-1 building blocks. Finally, simulations are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.